Ceci n’est pas un blog

Oh for crying out loud; I beg the readers not to not lecture me on whether I want to call this place a “website” or a “blog”. It’s one of my “idiosyncracies,” as Richard called them yesterday, and I really don’t appreciate lectures (often with dictionary definitions) of what a “blog” is. Some of the comments have been positively prissy, or even nasty. You can call it what you want, but for Ceiling Cat’s sake deep-six the lectures and strong-arming! I happen to think the word “blog” is hideously ugly, and prefer the classiness of “website”. Okay, gentle (and not-so-gentle) readers, let us not continue this semantic debate in the comments below, for it will not please the management.

And, if you haven’t realized the tongue-in-cheekness of my position, give yourself a humor check!

I do make an effort to refer to WEIT as a website whenever I mention it on my blog*. It’s simple courtesy and respect. Prof. Ceiling Cat has enriched my intellectual life in so many ways, the least I could do is use his preferred nomenclature for what is really a type of website anyway.

*Like the good professor, I too find the word ‘blog’ quite ugly, but I lack his integrity and have therefore capitulated to using it.

My real name has a diminutive form that I loathe. (You may know of another, with brothers Louie and Dewey.) Yet this nick is another, a Scottish variant that I’m very fond of. There’s no accounting for tastes, including one’s own.

Since website is just a less specific term than blog, I don’t see how people can correct you and claim you’re wrong. Someone wouldn’t be wrong if they referred to a car as vehicle, to a biologist as a scientist, or to a creationist as an idiot.

I would have thought that since the word ‘blog’ is a contraction of ‘web log’ that a blog, strictly speaking is simply a website where a person posts a brief description of their daily activities. For obvious reasons this sort of thing is not very popular so most personal websites nowadays are more eclectic and interesting than a straight blog would be.

Anyway, Jerry can obviously call WEIT whatever he likes, but if we want to get pedantic about semantics then I think you can make a case that most of the websites called blogs are actually the ones that are misnamed.

People, eh? Some of them just can’t function without arbitrary externally-imposed rules.

Had some prissy little granny-brain once give me an extremely hard time about the wiki to which I occasionally contribute, because the rules of said wiki did not match those which he thought a wiki ought to have. I was threatened with legal action. I confess that I was tempted to inform him about a personal orifice that he would not be able to see visually unaided into which I would have encouraged him to insert said legal action.